Reminds me of: www.holidaypirates.com With special websites for most bigger European countries. Its more or less doing the same, with lots of affiliations, an app, Whatapp group, etc.
Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
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Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#62Reminds me of: www.holidaypirates.com With special websites for most bigger European countries. Its more or less doing the same, with lots of affiliations, an app, Whatapp group, etc.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#63Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#64Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#65Reminds me of: www.holidaypirates.com With special websites for most bigger European countries. Its more or less doing the same, with lots of affiliations, an app, Whatapp group, etc.
99% of the time it's just affiliate links slapped on some deals found on FlyerTalk
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#66Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about…
Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speculation: it's possible that the source sites are actively hostile to scraping and intentionally mess with the layout regularly, or may even have ruled out any kind of automation in their ToS - so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.
>so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping. So why would it be hard to make scraping undetectable, anyway, unless you do it particularly incompetently? In theory, it seems pretty easy: use a browser string that matches an existing popular browser, and make sure to not load anything faster than a human would.
This is obviously helped recently by the relatively new headless modes for Chrome & Firefox, but before that it was using buggy headless implementations or Selenium. These weren't well suited to operations at scale.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#68I recently subscribed to the UK version of this ( https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk ). I didn't know there was a US version, I guess there might be lots of similar services. I wonder who came first.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#69Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about…
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#70I hate to be the one to ask, but how much moat does this actually have? Couldn't Kayak literally just add a subscribe or alert me later input and have their massive infrastructure automate this very thing?
The thing is that if you're looking for a very specific destination, you'll almost never get the best deals. Flight deals work best for people who are very flexible about destination and timing.